‘Why would you put a toxic product into the hands of a young child?’: director turned activist Beeban Kidron on why big tech needs its ‘tobacco moment’

In her work as an online safety campaigner, the baroness and Bridget Jones director has seen things she can never unsee – and she’s furious at the tech overlords doing nothing to stop the abuse

T hrough the open windows behind Beeban Kidron drifts the unmistakable sound of children playing. Her north ­London office is sandwiched between a school and a nursery, and the occasional playground shriek functions as an aural reminder of what we’re here to discuss: the safety and happiness of young people, growing up in an age of screens.

Though our conversation takes some dark turns, only once does the film director turned crossbench peer and online safety campaigner for children lose her composure. “I have seen a lot of things I’d rather not see,” she says, slowly. “But the worst thing was not the most extreme. It was watching a child’s face as she realised that the person who she thought was her friend wasn’t her friend; that the sex acts she’d been doing weren’t for her friend; and that there may have been other people in the room.

“And I watched her face and I watched her crumble. It was her spirit, it was her trust, it was her sense of who she was, it was her judgment. It was all those things that you need to be a human being, smashed.

“I have seen some shit. But that moment is why I am …” She falters, briefly. “I am angry that we are willing to know this, and ignore this. And I find it very difficult to moderate that anger.”

The book Kidron has written about battling big tech, Users, isn’t simply furious. In parts it’s gossipy, even unexpectedly funny, as her old celebrity life as the director of movies such as Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason collides with her new political mission. (One anecdote ends with her old friend Elton John calling the then technology secretary Peter Kyle – who comes out of the book noticeably badly – a moron, live on television ).

But the woman in front of me, makeup free and with her hair bundled up in a clip, is no Hollywood luvvie. Her expertise dates back to 2012, and a documentary she made when her own son and daughter were teenagers about how smartphones were changing childhood . That led to her founding the charity 5Rights Foundation , which campaigns for children’s rights online, and a search for solutions taking her from Silicon Valley boardrooms to the Vatican and many places in between.

The book is an impassioned cri de coeur against an industry she sees as out of control, though she says it was written partly to show that we’re not powerless to put it back in its box: that in an attention economy, individuals have the ultimate sanction of withholding our attention from the platforms desperate for it. But it’s also an “absolute cry of rage against the political class” for what she sees as successive governments’ failure to protect not just children but adults whose lives have also been reshaped by tech. “Come for the children, stay for humanity,” she says drily.